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Decentralizing Legislation In China’S Law On Legislation Amendment, Wei Cui, Jiang Wan

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We present a novel account of China’s recent move to decentralize legislation through amending the Law on Legislation (LL). Conventional wisdom pervading both Chinese political discourse and social scientific scholarship on China portrays law as incompatible with experimentation and as only suitable for codifying policies adopted after experimentation. Moreover, the value of legislatures is viewed as lying in their independence from the executive branch. We highlight rationales offered by the Chinese Communist Party for the LL amendment that repudiate these assumptions: the Party proclaimed the intention to promote lawmaking as a central instrument of policy experimentation; moreover, the Party’s intervention …